The present invention relates to a self-emptying centrifuge drum for clarifying and separating liquids, consisting of parts that are rotation-symmetrically connected and having an annular gap in the vicinity of its longer diameter for letting off solids, the gap being constituted by two parts of the drum and capable of being opened and closed by a piston slide.
A centrifuge drum of this type is known, for example, from German OS 2 930 526. The parts that constitute the annular gap in that device are held together by bolts that are distributed uniformly around the circumference at the periphery of the drum.
Even when the bolts can be manufactured extraordinarily precise, however, the unavoidable differences in tolerance between them and the bores in the parts of the drum that accommodate them will allow all the parts to run unsatisfactorily out of true and will lead to undesired unbalances. Although this is admittedly claimed to be eliminated by the distribution of the bolts proposed in German OS 3 101 713, that solution leads to other matching sites that exhibit the same problems. Both solutions are also subject to the defect that the bolts can accept only tensile forces and no radial or tangential forces of the type that can occur when the drum empties. Centrifugal forces, moreover, will lead to flection of the bolts and accordingly to deformations, making the bolts unusable. Furthermore, mounting the bolts in the solids space of the drum makes it impossible to rule out wear in the case of erosive solids, so that the strength of the bolts will decrease with time.